Well, I’ve finally managed to stop playing long enough. It only took a few weeks.

While it’s true that my desire to own a PS4 was primarily driven by the need to play Persona 5 in its purest form, I’m not letting the system lie dormant until April. Instead, I’ve been obsessively playing both World of Final Fantasy and Gravity Rush for the past few weeks. and while I am enjoying both games immensely, it’s World of Final Fantasy that’s really got me hooked. It pushes every single one of my gamer buttons in the best ways possible while delivering a charmingly nonsensical plot built upon adorable piles of nostalgia.

Although this game represents the maiden voyage of first-time game director Hiroki Chiba, Tetsuya Nomura designed many of the characters original to the game, so it’s unsurprising that many of them look like they could have escaped from a Kingdom Hearts game.

They’re named like Kingdom Hearts characters, too.

The plot is also like something out of a Kingdom Hearts game. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kingdom Hearts. I’ve played most of the games in the franchise. But that plot, y’all. If you can call it a plot. It might be more accurate to describe it as a fever dream made mostly of keyblades and awkwardly positioned zippers.

The plot of your game might be too complicated if it requires flowcharts to explain.

So in World of Final Fantasy, the story follows a pair of twins named Lann and Reynn who have lived in a timeless pocket dimension for some unspecified number of years.

^ Reynn Lann^

One day, a talking white fox with a crown on its butt appears on Lann’s head while he serves coffee at Totally-Not-Starbucks to a mysterious woman who may or may not be God.

The face of God…?

Reynn and Lann discover that they are Pokemon Trainers…I mean, mirage keepers, and they must journey through the mysterious land of Grymoire, a world full of Final Fantasy franchise characters, monsters, locations, and spells. The kingdoms of Grymoire are being annexed by the (clearly evil) Bahamutian Federation. There are a bunch of equally mysterious and clearly evil bad guys in improbable costumes lurking about and muttering ominous things about prophecies.

I wonder how long it takes that knight to put on her parrot cosplay every morning.

Reynn and Lann must embark on an adventure through the kingdoms, running into as many Final Fantasy cameos as possible, capturing mirages, and rediscovering their pasts.

I love it.

The systems underpinning this silly romp through the land of nostalgia are deeply satisfying to the classic JRPG gamer in me. It’s turn-based menu combat, for one thing, which is, as far as I am concerned, the hallmark of a Final Fantasy game (looking askance at you, Final Fantasy XIII and XV).

The Active Time Battle system makes a triumphant return. You can adjust the speed and you can even turn it off, if you like, but I’ve been playing on the second-fastest speed, and I’ve been pleased by the pleasant challenge that this offers, particularly if you’re facing off against a large mob of monsters who are throwing a barrage of attacks at you as you scroll desperately through your menu to select the most effective abilities to defeat your enemies as efficiently as possible. At slower speeds, the ATB drags painfully, and turning the battles from Active to Wait makes them boring, so I would definitely recommend playing them at as fast a speed as you are comfortable.

Most of the strategy, however, comes from organizing your stacks. Your party is comprised of Reynn, Lann, and four of their captured mirages configured into two “stacks.” Basically, you wear adorable renderings of classic Final Fantasy baddies as hats. It’s all very silly.

Alternately, while you are in Lilikin form, large mirages can wear you as a hat. I’m not sure which is sillier.

Despite the undeniable silliness, the whole thing is wonderfully complicated and interesting. By changing which mirages are within which stacks, you are able to completely change the stats, skill load-outs, strengths, and weaknesses of your stacks as a whole. Abilities “stack” as well, meaning that, for example, if you have two mirages in your stack who know Fire, you can cast Fira. It’s an addictive and endlessly customizable system. Especially once you add in the exciting fact that every mirage has its own tiny sphere grid!

*heavy breathing*

Mechanically-speaking, it’s a very solid game. As for the aforementioned plot? Well, it’s a hot mess of madness made even weirder by some cheerfully hammy voice acting and a localization that appears to have been crafted by slightly tipsy hipster nerds. I don’t know if things are a little more sedate in the Japanese voice tracks, but the English version is unilaterally crazypants bananas. When Lann isn’t making a nonsensical non-joke, he is misunderstanding every situation and statement directed towards him, usually in head-scratchingly stupid ways that would only make sense if he were catastrophically stoned 100% of the time.

The rest of the dialogue is equally weird. Tama (the fox with a crown on its butt) speaks the-with the “adorable” the-quirk of adding the word “the”in front of random the-words. Some mirages make up entirely new words.

Some mirages speak in hilariously inappropriate slang.

Even the mirage descriptions climb aboard the redonk train, making terrible puns, Final Fantasy in-jokes, and the occasional American pop-culture reference.

Now, I just want to be clear: I am not complaining. It’s endlessly fascinating to see what weird-ass thing the localization is going to do next. The cutscenes are constant, but they are never boring, because there is a 100% guarantee that someone will say something completely ridiculous. I admire the aplomb and gravitas with which these (presumably) professional, adult voice actors read some of these lines.

The game is quite nice to look at, with a colorful, cartoon-y style and bright, attractive colors. The chibi re-imaginings of classic Final Fantasy characters are more than tolerably charming.

Look at tiny Yuna’s tiny, adorable, angry eyebrows!

The backgrounds are full of depth and rich color, and the monster designs are attractive and varied, though it wouldn’t be a Final Fantasy game without the occasional palette swap.

I have few real complaints about this game thus far. I wish the music were better, but holding the soundtrack of every game up to the Uematsu gold standard is probably unreasonable. There’s nothing in the game’s soundtrack that is bad, exactly, it’s just bland. It sounds a bit like the slow pianos of Kingdom Hearts, but without the groove, and with more lame remixing of old Final Fantasy tunes. Other than this minor gripe, I am having a blast. It’s doing everything I want a game to do, and it’s doing those things pretty well.

Playing World of Final Fantasy is like snorting pixie stix of nostalgia — it’s colorful, saccharine, and kind of weird, but it tastes pretty great.

After all, I reasoned, my primary issues with the game were the weird Kingdom Hearts-esque combat mechanics and the unfortunate predominance of bros as opposed to the usual mixed-gender party. Parish’s observations during his time with the first six hours of the game seemed to indicate that the combat did have turn-based options that opened battles up to be more strategic, something that makes the game seem much more appealing to me. The gender thing wasn’t going away, but I figured I could just deal with it. If this weren’t a mainline Final Fantasy game, I thought, I’d absolutely play it, bros or not, so I ought to just get over myself and look forward to a game that was starting to sound like it was going to be pretty solid.

Critics have notbeenkind to Kingsglaive, but that’s hardly surprising. The movie isn’t really a film; it’s an unusually long opening cutscene to a video game that just happened to be released before the rest of the game. I knew that going in, and you know what, as an opening cutscene, it’s pretty rad. The animation is absolutely stunning, the setting is fascinating with its mix of high fantasy and modern technology, and the voice acting (featuring the likes of Lena Hadley and Sean Bean) was unusually good for a piece of video game media. The action was a lot like Advent Children, a movie which I thoroughly enjoyed: fast-paced, very shiny, and occurring primarily in mid-air. Many of the characters were interesting enough, particularly King Regis, although his charisma may have been helped along by the natural gravitas that Sean Bean brings to any regal role. There was a lot to like here.

What ruined the movie for me was the the women.

Now, look. I know I sound like a broken record, constantly harping on the way that women are portrayed in video games. Why bother politicizing games? Why bring feminist thought into this at all? Why can’t I just sit down and enjoy a game without dragging gender into it? And you know what? I wish I could. I wish I could just play a game without this constant nagging itch of annoyance at the back of my head about gender stereotypes, but I can’t. It’s upsetting. It’s a constant reminder that so much of society has these outdated ideas of what women are and what they are supposed to be, and I don’t want to be those things.

I love video games. I spend enormous chunks of my life playing video games, because I’m passionate about my hobby, I enjoy experiencing stories in a completely interactive way, and I’m a big fan of solving puzzles and using strategy to conquer virtual challenges. And let me tell you, it is fucking disheartening to have this constant reminder in my favorite pastime that as a general rule, women are not as important, not as strong, not as powerful, not as interesting, not as numerous, and not as varied as men.

This is particularly hard to deal with in this, my favorite franchise. Final Fantasy brought me into the modern era of gaming. I played Atari as a child, experiencing a colorful world of primarily genderless pixels. I played Sonic the Hedgehog at my cousin’s house, and while I know Sonic is ostensibly male, he’s a Goddamn hedgehog, so his gender seems somewhat less relevant. Then I skipped straight to Final Fantasy X. This was my introduction to women in gaming:

Lulu, Yuna, and Rikku. Three wildly different women with wildly different personalities who had independent motivations, powerful abilities in battle, and interesting story arcs. I followed this game up with Final Fantasy VII, where I got to hang out with these awesome ladies:

Then I moved onto Final Fantasy VIII:

Are we seeing a theme? Sure, the women of Final Fantasy are often mages rather than front-line fighters, some of them are irritating as hell (I’m looking at you, Selphie), and sometimes they have to be saved by the men, but not always. And that’s the important bit, the not always.Sometimes women need saving. That’s fine. As long as the women sometimes get to be the savior. Like Yuna, who is on a quest to save her entire world. Sometimes women are healers, like Aerith. That’s fine, because she’s contrasted with Tifa, who will punch the shit out of anything that stays still long enough to let her do it. Sometimes women are even the bad guys, like Sorceress Edea in FFVII. That’s all I want. Variety. Acknowledgement that women are as different and varied as men with different strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes and modes of dress.

One of the reasons I like the Final Fantasy franchise so much is that there are always examples of strong and varied women. Always. If we discount Final Fantasy I, which was pretty light on the plot anyway, every single mainline Final Fantasy game has a diverse mixture of men and women in the roster of playable characters. They are almost always outnumbered by the men, but they are there and they are awesome and that was enough for me.

So it was a slap in the face when it was announced that Final Fantasy XV would have only men in the party. It was salt in the wound when director Hajime Tataba explained that this choice would make the game “more approachable” and more “sincere and honest”. My experience with this “more approachable” game was a sour one when I played the demo and discovered the sole example of female representation over the course of the experience:

But still. After a year of feeling frustrated about this, I was starting to come to terms with it. It could still be a good game. Maybe the final product would have more women in it, and maybe those women would be interesting. Maybe those women would take a more central role in Kingsglaive! After all, Lunafreya is right in the center of the poster! After all, Hironobu Sakaguchi himself said that the movie justified the lack of women in the game.

So I rented the movie and sat down to watch it last night with Boyfriend. And no. In case you were wondering. No. It didn’t justify anything. It just made everything worse.

There are exactly four women who speak words in this movie. Four. One is an unnamed female chancellor of King Regis. She appears in one scene and speaks a single line in favor of making peace. One is the Queen of the neighboring kingdom of Tenebrae, the Princess Lunafreya’s mother, who is tragically murdered approximately half a minute after she appears. One is Crowe, a mage in the Kingsglaive army, who manages to survive about thirty minutes before she too is tragically murdered. And one is the aforementioned Princess Lunafreya, who is ostensibly a central character.

Let’s talk first about Crow.

Well, hey, she looks pretty cool. And she wants to be a great, strong character. And I want her to be a great, strong character. But she isn’t.

FYI: The rest of this post contains heavy spoilers for Kingsglaive.

She appears in the first battle early in the movie, a battle between the elite soldiers of the Kingsglaive and the forces of the powerful empire Niflheim. The men of the Kingsglaive are clearly badasses, teleporting around the battlefield, destroying monsters, saving one another. What are Crowe and the other four women of the Kingsglaive up to?

Why, they’re hanging back as mages, shielding the big, strong men! Because of course they are.

Now I just want to point out as an aside: there is nothing wrong with women being mages. My point here is that these are the only women in the Kingsglaive. There are no women in combat on the ground. They are only support.

But fine, whatever, later on Crowe gets to go on a covert mission on her own to sneak into Niflheim and escort Princess Lunafreya to safety!

Hell yes, maybe the girls will get to kick ass together as they fight their way out of Niflheim together, getting to know each other, establishing some rapport together, and then maybe they can show up later in the game itself and be the kickass women I look for in a Final Fantasy game, and then…

OOPS NEVER MIND

No, instead, Crowe is delivered back to the city of Insomnia in a body bag. We don’t see her die. We don’t know what happened to her. She simply becomes a plot point in the character arc of Libertus, who vows revenge on the king for throwing “the weak to the wolves”. The “weak” in this analogy being, of course, Crowe. Later on, we get to hear from General Glauca about how Crowe cried when he shot her. That’s the last we hear about her in the movie.

Here’s our last woman, the Princess Lunafreya Nox Fleuret.

She’s in the middle of the Goddamn poster, so she must be strong and important! Right?

No, of course not. She spends twelve years locked in a tower as a hostage. She’s offered in marriage to Noctis, the prince of Lucis and the son of King Regis. All she wants to do is fulfill her “duty.” What her “duty” is we never find out, unless her duty is to be passively passed off from man to man over the course of the movie, first from her brother Ravus to Aldercept, leader of Niflheim, who brings her to King Regis in order to marry her to the prince; then from King Regis to Nyx, a member of the Kingsglaive assigned to guard the princess, the main protagonist; then from Nyx to General Glauca, who kidnaps her as a ruse; then she’s stolen back by Nyx, who takes her back to Regis, who sends her off with Nyx, who eventually passes her off to Libertus.

At one point in the movie King Regis and Aldercept have a conversation in which Luna is referred to as a precious object that has been stolen. Regis comments that this stolen object has “a will of its own,” but she must have a will of her own while she’s off screen, because on screen, she is only a receptacle for the will of the men surrounding her.

But the absolute worst moment in the movie, the moment I threw up my hands in disbelief and disgust, the moment I just stopped giving a shit about anything else that happened, the moment that I knew that Lunafreya was never going to be allowed to be anything but an object, came in the last thirty minutes of the movie. Luna and Nyx have fled the scene of the murder of King Regis, whose last action was to entrust Luna with the precious Ring of the Lucii, an artifact that allows the worthy ruler of Lucis to command the power of the crystal. Anyone unworthy who puts on the ring bursts into flame and is consumed by the ring’s power. General Glauca has pursued the fleeing princess and her guardian, and he’s got them cornered against a statue. Luna is holding the ring. She knows she’s not of the royal blood of Lucis, she knows that putting on the ring will likely result in her death, but she’s going to do it anyway, because she knows that there’s no other way. She isn’t afraid to die. She starts to put the ring on her finger…

…only to have Nyx snatch it away and declare that he’s the hero, not her. He puts the ring on. He saves the day. He saves the princess who is not permitted to save herself.

Nyx sends Luna away from the scene of the battle with Libertus. She buckles herself in his car next to the latest man in a long line of men who get to be responsible for saving her, since she can’t save herself. She looks at Libertus and says, “My life is in your hands.”

Her life isn’t in her own hands. She’s nothing without the men surrounding her.

So fuck you, Final Fantasy XV. Don’t feed me any more lines of bullshit about how the lack of women in the game is “justified” and “more approachable”. Your treatment of women has done nothing but alienate and insult me and all other members of my gender. You have, in fact, made your game and its world completely unapproachable for fully one-half of your audience. I came to this hoping for a Yuna, an Aerith, a Terra, or a Rinoa. You gave me a passive object instead, a pretty princess to be traded back and forth like a shiny bauble. You gave me a tragic plot point in the arc of a male character poorly disguised as a badass. You gave me nothing.

UPDATE: About 30 minutes after posting this, I became aware of Sqaure Enix’s latest marketing push for FFXV: #FFLegacies. Fans are invited to share their experiences with the Final Fantasy franchise on social media. Very well, Square Enix. Let this be my “legacy”.

Something about leveling up my Steam account by linking it to Boyfriend’s has filled me with a fever, and the only cure is more Steam games. I was so ready to play The Stanley Parable, but Archimedes, my elderly laptop, can’t quite muster the resources to run it without it crashing into a spectacular cacophony of skipping audio juxtaposed with a blank screen. So…perhaps something that requires a little less CPU…

99 Spirits, developed by the excellently-named Fruitbat Factory, has been chilling out at the top of my Steam library for long enough that I can’t quite remember where or when I picked it up. It was probably in a bundle. I didn’t know much about the game when I booted it up, other than a vague memory that its battle system was somehow puzzle-related.

The premise of the game is that you are the daughter of a shrine maiden who was murdered by demons called Tsukumogami. You love to kick Tsukumogami ass all day long, but you’re bummed, because the buggers always run away before you can properly murder them. But one day, this mysterious fox shows up and hands you a sword and is like, “Hey, you can murder Tsukumogami much more effectively by using this magic demon-murdering sword!” And you’re like, “Hell yeah! Let’s murder demons!” And then you get down to the business of murdering demons.

There is an actual story here, populated by a collection of anime-inspired characters with fairly attractive artwork.

Although…what is up with her boobs?

Some of the translation feels a little awkward, but it’s grammatically correct, perfectly adequate, and gets the story across effectively enough. I even rather enjoy some of the wackier turns of phrase.

“Genius of tripping over” is almost as hilarious an appellation as “master of unlocking.”

Movement through the world involves an interesting grid-based map that is only vaguely representational of the environment. It reminds me a of a simplified version of the world map in the first Persona game. People and objects are portrayed by geometric shapes on a blank grid.

Green for places, blue for people and treasures, and yellow for objectives.

It’s a bit visually bland and certainly repetitive, but it does a serviceable job of getting the point across, I suppose. The same grid is used for exploration outside of the town, with little clouds of vapor representing enemy encounters.

The battle system is the attraction here, and it’s so wonderfully kooky and unique that I wanted so much to like this game, because I love the concept.

You face off against a Tsukumogami, who is obscured by a cloud of vapor. You can’t actually attack and kill the demon until you dispel the vapors, and you can’t dispel the vapor until you correctly guess the Tsukumogami’s identity. You do this by attacking and blocking until the gems in your sword acquire enough power to allow you to beat a clue about its name out of the demon. This sounds impossible until you realize that all of the Tsukumogami are apparently demonic, sentient, familiar items and objects. This is pretty cool, actually, because it’s based on an idea common in Japanese folklore that an object that has been around for at least 100 years becomes self-aware, though I don’t think they necessarily become evil demons when they do so. These Tsukumogami, though…super evil.

Tremble before the might of this demonic spoon.

So, for instance, you might build up your gem power, activate the special attack, and the word “protection” flashes up. Great, now you know that the demon is an object that offers some kind of protection. You build up your power, activating the attack once more, and this time the letters RI appear. Okay, cool, it’s some sort of protective item with the letters R and I in its name. You hit it two more times, discovering that its name also contains the letters CO and that it has something to do with “weather.” Aha! It’s a “raincoat!” Then, you block a few times to build up the power of your second gem, whose power will bring up a keyboard, and you can type in your guess.

Yeah yeah, this isn’t the raincoat, but I forgot to take a screen shot of that one.

If you guess correctly, POOF! The vapors disappear, the Tsukumogami’s true nature is revealed, and you can murder the fuck out of it!

The demon sickle is actually pretty intimidating.

This is such a clever idea for a battle system. The concept is quite brilliant, and I can’t think of another game that does something similar. Maybe Bookworm Adventures, but that’s more of a word find than a neat guessing game. Here’s the problem though. Battles take far too long. It takes a few attacks to build up enough power in your gem to generate a clue, and since your attacks are mapped to a single key, this is a boring and repetitive process. The puzzles themselves are engaging enough, but you’ll need at least three or four clues to correctly suss out the Tsukumogami’s name, so this quickly becomes tedious. Then, once you’ve guessed it, you have to charge the other gem in order to bring up the keyboard to type in your guess. If you’re wrong, you have to repeat the process all over again.

Now, it’s possible that this process becomes quicker or more interesting as the game progresses. I am given to understand that you are eventually able to capture demons and turn them into allies, ala Pokemon. But man…I do not have the patience to get there. I barely had the patience to play the hour I did play. Which is sad, really. I didn’t know I wanted a word puzzle RPG until it existed. Sadly, this is not quite the word puzzle RPG I am looking for.

Despite the fact that it contains a perverted fox. You can’t go wrong with a perverted fox.

I neglect my Steam games far too frequently. I own almost ninety of the damn things. I’ve played perhaps a handful of them; beaten only a scant few. However, the desire to acquire games remains strong within me, an addiction that Valve is only too happy to enable through their periodic and highly gamified Steam Sales.

I’ve been very good this year during the Steam Winter Sale! I haven’t yet purchased a single thing! Some of my friends and students, on the other hand, have been gifting me yet more games. Well, that doesn’t count, right? If I didn’t buy them? Of course not. And obviously, if someone has spent a bit of coin on a game to bring me joy, I most certainly owe it to them to play the game right away!

One of my students bought me Undertale, a game that has been on my Steam Wishlist since I read a very positive review of it in my October Game Informer. The review was rhapsodic in its praise of the game, but gave few specifics, explaining that too many details would ruin the game’s surprises. My interest was piqued, but I forgot about it until the game appeared in my inventory last week.

As I was stuck at my family’s house for Christmas, and I was experiencing a deadly combination of jet lag, insomnia, and being forced to sleep on the living room floor, I played a lot of Undertale in lieu of slumber.

I would argue that playing Undertale might have been better than sleeping.

The game, by indie developer Toby Fox, was a successfully-funded 2013 Kickstarter project. Fox’s goal was $5,000. He received a total of $51,124. He developed every aspect of the game on his own, a process that took a little over two and a half years. The finished game was released in September of this year, at which point everyone who played it collectively lost their shit.

The Game Informer review had the right idea; if I reveal too many details about the plot and a few of its gameplay aspects, some of Undertale’s mind-blowing charm will be irrevocably sullied. I think, however, that I can share enough to build a compelling argument as to why you (and everyone you know) should play this game right now.

The jumping-off point for the plot is that long ago, humans sealed the monster race underground with magic. You play as a small, pudgy human child of indiscriminate age and gender who has fallen from above into the world of monsters. The game chronicles your journey to return to the land of the humans. While on the surface this seems pretty straightforward, the game quickly breaks its 8-bit RPG mold, bending genre conventions and slyly breaking the fourth wall in in startling and unexpected ways. What sorts of ways? I’m not going to tell you. You’re just going to have to play the damn game and figure it out for yourself.

If you yet stubbornly cling to your skepticism, here are some other reasons that you should play this game that I am actually willing to share.

For one thing, the game is hauntingly beautiful for an 8-bit game. Fox made some really lovely design choices, letting the limits of the retro art style work for him. Exploring Undertale’s environments is a magical, otherworldly journey. Adding to this dreamlike quality is the truly excellent soundtrack. I’m very fond of 8-bit music, and Fox’s beautiful work stands among the greats, with tunes that evoke in me an excitement and wonder similar to the soundtracks of the early Final Fantasy games. This is high praise indeed, and lest you think I hyperbolize, give this track a listen.

The gameplay is equally compelling. Simple puzzles and interesting dialogue interactions encourage you to take a look at everything in this weird, wonderful, and frequently humorous world.

A world that is occasionally decidedly and unrepentantly weird.

Like the RPGs of old, Undertale has random encounters, though never so many that they at any point become tedious.

Although the battle system is ostensibly turn-based, it adds a few fascinating wrinkles to that tried-and-true RPG standby. Most interestingly, there are lots of options in combat that do not involve actual fighting. Negotiation is possible with your enemies, though you need to take into account their personal proclivities in order to get anywhere, in a diplomacy system not unlike the demon negotiations present in most of the core Shin Megami Tensei games.

In addition to having a great many unique combat options, the battle system itself is not purely menu-based. After you select an option, you must stay on your toes to dodge the attacks of the monsters you encounter in fast-paced tiny levels of miniaturized bullet hell.

Some of these attacks are pretty tricky to dodge (and frankly, I suck at them), but it makes for tense and fun battles that rarely become too frustrating.

I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of my time with Undertale so far. It constantly surprises me, a rarity in RPG games. Spending time in its ethereal, pixelated environments reminds me of my earliest experiences with interactive entertainment, filled constantly with delightful surprises and strange beauty.

You have absolutely zero excuses to avoid playing this game. It isn’t too terribly long, it will run on almost any computer, and it’s on sale RIGHT NOW in the Steam Store. Really, go buy it right now. Play it. Be transported. Stay determined.

All right, guys. Stop reading this for a minute, and go to Steam. Search To The Moon, and buy that shit. Right now. It’s on sale until Wednesday for $2.99. That’s like a burger and fries. You can give up a burger and fries for this game. It’s totally, 100% worth it. Look, I’ll make it easy, here’s the link.

Okay, bought the game? Great. Now I will tell you why you should play it, and I won’t spoil anything, because the joy of this game is in the discovery.

To The Moon is an indie title, released by Freebird Games back in 2011. It received a lot of buzz when it first came out, both for its story and presentation. I downloaded the demo and really liked it, but I was also really broke, so even the $9.99 asking price seemed a little steep at the time. Goddess bless the Steam Holiday Sale, though! When I saw To The Moon for 70% off, I was all over that shit like a chocobo on some gysahl greens.

The game was developed using the RPG Maker engine, which gives it an absolutely charming SNES atmosphere. Even though the graphics are relatively simplistic for this day and age, they ooze with retro charm and are more than adequate to tell the really excellent story that is on display here.

Because that is absolutely what this game’s purpose is: to tell a story, a really moving, deep, and beautiful story about life and death and love and the nature of memory. There honestly isn’t a lot of what you would consider “gameplay.” You move around, you click on things, you read dialogue, and you solve simple tile puzzles.

That’s it. That is all there is to this game. But that’s all it needs, as it turns out.

The basic premise is that in the near future, a company called Sigmund Corp. has developed a way to change the memories of a person who is dying in order to fulfill their final wish. To that end, Dr. Eva Rosaline and Dr. Neil Watts are dispatched to the deathbed of Johnny Wyles. His wish? To go to the moon, although Johnny can’t explain why it’s so important that he get there.

What follows is a journey back in time through Johnny’s life. Each memory that Eva and Neil visit is connected to the next by a “memento,” an object that appears in both memories. So most of the gameplay part of the game consists of locating and activating each memento, then solving an easy tile-flipping puzzle so that you can proceed to the next memory. The puzzles have a par number of moves to finish in, but you receive no penalty for taking more moves to solve it. You’ll get good at them. I think I’m a little over halfway through the game, and I hit the par almost every time now.

So it’s a very easy game, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is finding out what is going on in the memories of Johnny Wyles, and figuring out what is up with his late wife, River. And you are not going to want to stop playing. You are going to want to know. Part of this is because it’s a really well-paced story. Every time you solve one mystery, you find that the solution only presents more mysteries to solve. The dialogue is also genuinely charming and funny, something that I really appreciated. RPG dialogue tends to be kind of stilted, and any humor is usually unintentional (spoony bard, anyone?). When RPG dialogue tries to be funny, it usually falls flat and comes out as the awkward, forced humor you find in some anime, you know the kind, where all the characters just start laughing at something that wasn’t really that funny, and then the camera pans away while the voice actors are trying to keep laughing in a way that doesn’t sound like they’re trying waaay too hard?

Well, that doesn’t happen in To The Moon. Dr. Neil Watts is actually hilarious.

And also apparently a huge nerd.

Not only is the dialogue funny and interesting, the story moving and fascinating, but the music is gorgeous. Kan Gao, the head developer and composer, plays a mean sad piano. The tunes are wistful and heartbreaking and will make you want to cry. All the time. I really regret not buying the soundtrack bundled with the game (only $3.74 during the Steam sale!), and I may go back and grab it before the sale ends. It’s like a dollar fifty on its own. That’s like some fries. I can sacrifice fries for beautiful music!

I haven’t finished the game yet, and it’s really gnawing at me, like when you’re stuck in a really good book, but you haven’t found the time to finish reading it yet, so whenever you’re not reading it, you’re thinking about it. The story is really that good. There’s a reason it won GameSpot’s Best Story award of 2011, beating out several much larger, higher-profile games. Story is the main reason I play games, and this one has the purest, most interesting story of any game I’ve played in a long, long time. Maybe ever.

GO. TO STEAM. NOW. I promise, this is the best $2.99 you will ever spend.